Tag Archives: arduino

Alan Yorinks shared on Arduino Community on Gplus a physical computing environment he created to make it easier for 10 and 11 year old’s to start playing. He picked up an Arduino Esplora, and wrote some software so that it could be controlled from the Scratch and Snap! graphical programming languages. According to Alan, the Arduino Esplora has on-board integrated sensors, actuators and make it a perfect match for the graphical programming languages that the kids love to use.

By combining an Arduino Esplora microcontroller with the esp4s library and either the Scratch or Snap! programming languages, that first line of code can be written in minutes!

After you had an introduction to Intel Edison following the Getting Started guide, and our previous tutorial, the Intel Edison mini-breakout Getting Started Guide, it’s now time to work on something a bit more complex. You’ll be also able to play a bit with Node.js, a programming platform that runs on javascript and a good choice for building a web-based application. It is supported by the Intel® Edison standard system image so you can run node.js scripts directly on it.

He shoots! He scores! The crowd goes wild! Let’s build a robot that plays basketball with you. This tutorial is a step-by-step guide for a simple and small differential-drive robot that uses the Intel Edison. You’ll get to know a few more tricks on how to use Mini Breakout Kit and set up a node.js server for the communication.

A science teacher at Bundang management high school 20 kilometers southeast of downtown Seoul, South Korea, involved his students in an Arduino Music project running Arduino Uno, Sparkfun Music Instrument Shield and Makey Makey.

Students started studying the principles of sensors and then built their own music instruments using recycled materials. Finally they played them as you can see from the video he shared with us:

Marco Mauro is a physicist currently employed as Scientific Coordinator at Novaetech, the first Spin-off Company of the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) in Italy. He shared with us all the info about a project he’s been working on and based on Arduino Micro.

OpenQCM is a fully open source scientific microbalance capable of weighing mass deposition down to 1 billionth of gram:

The sensing core of the microbalance is a piezoelectric quartz crystal oscillator. The deposition of a very tiny mass on the surface causes the variation in the quartz frequency. openQCM belongs to a new generation of innovative smart sensor which boast high resolution and ultra high mass sensitivity. The open source strategy made the creation of openQCM available at low cost which represents a bit fraction of the cost of similar scientific products.

openQCM was built keeping in mind the emergent principles of the open source hardware movement. The open source hardware gives people the freedom to control their technology through the open exchange of all the project features, 3D design, electronics and software. The open hardware potentiality is even greater when it comes to hardware for scientific applications.

openQCM is exactly something like that, the first open hardware quartz crystal microbalance with applications in a wide range of scientific fields, such as chemical and biological sensing, material science.

openQCM has an Arduino Micro board inside at heart. By hacking the timer counter of the AtMega32U4 Arduino microcontroller, it is possible to measure the quartz crystal frequency variations using the 16 Mhz microprocessor clock. openQCM team has designed an Arduino Micro shield with an embedded quartz crystal oscillator driver circuit and a temperature sensor. The output of the quartz crystal oscillator driver is fed to the Arduino Micro timer counter and the analog value of the temperature sensor is fed to the analog pin of the board. This configuration allow you measure the quartz crystal frequency with a resolution of 1 Hz, which roughly corresponds to a mass resolution of 700 pg over the entire quartz surface in air.

One of the major challenge of an open hardware project is that such devices require funding to prototype and manufacture. That’s why the openQCM team have selected the 3d printing technology to keep high quality and low cost. Using 3d printing to print out the prototypes via the SLS process from OS Formiga P100, P110, P395, and P730, the openQCM team created the device’s parts, which required a precision down to 60 µm.

The open source concept made openQCM publicly available so that anyone (scientists, technology enthusiast, makers, hobbyist …) can study, modify, and develop the hardware based on the original design. openQCM is now working and ready to win the heart of the scientific community and more.

Today we are adding to Arduino website a new important page. It’s called About Us and presents all the people working at Arduino, side by side with the Arduino founders, from different locations around the world.

Our big team, with its multifaceted skillset, takes care of the complexity of an open-source hardware project like Arduino, made by the Hardware, the Software, the Design of all the artifacts and the user experience, the coordination of these activities by the Management, and of course the work with its Community of volunteers and enthusiasts.

This almost invisible works helps Arduino thrive and hopefully makes it easier for you to learn electronics and have fun!

Come meet us on March 28th in all the official locations of Arduino Day!

Today is the day of a solar eclipse, some of these are once in a lifetime events.

Arduino is definitely one of the events that will define my life along with many other people’s life.

I’m feeling incredibly blessed to have contributed to create this amazing community which gathered around the idea that we can empower people to master complex technologies and unleash their ability to create with them.

Dear community I’m sorry I didn’t comment earlier, I was keeping quiet to try to find a resolution to our internal issues that would not damage you, the community.

We’ve been so committed to keep the issues internal that for a year we haven’t receiving any royalty from the boards made in Italy, but we continued to work hoping to find a solution.I’ve told the story to Make read it if you want to know more.

Now the other party has abandoned the negotiating table and, after a lot of recent events, the cat is out of the bag.I owe you to be part of what is going on.

We created Arduino based on a set of values that have enabled the community to grow, touch any kind of people and contribute to changing the world a bit.

I am here to say that we will continue to fight so that Arduino stays true to those values. There is only one Arduino and there is only one Arduino community. We’re strong, we’re having a positive impact on so many people’s life.

We have so many news we want to share with you but be patient until Arduino Day, let’s celebrate together the amazing community we are (261 Global events!!!) , and you’ll know more.

I’m sure you have a lot of questions an we’re going to try to answer them in due time, compatibly with the fact that lawyers are involved and I can’t say too much.

An eclipse is just a temporary moment of darkness, but soon after the sun comes back shining.

Hackaball is a smart and responsive ball that children can program to invent and play games. It was recently backed by more than 1000 people and reached the goal!

As many other projects on Kickstarter, Hackaball was initially prototyped with Arduino using sensors that detect motions like being dropped, bounced, kicked, shaken or being perfectly still.

We got in touch with its team and asked them to tell us a bit more about the creation process:

Our early versions of the ball worked with the Arduino Uno board, progressing to a breadboard Arduino and then making our own SMD designs with the Uno. In the latests prototypes we used the Arduino Leonardo and our current version runs on the Arduino Mega. Our production version will run on an ARM chip.

We hope to offer Arduino Compatibility as one of our stretch goals in the Kickstarter, so that people can buy a board and put their own code on it using the Arduino software, effectively moving one step up from the app in terms of hacking the ball and making it do what you want it to do. We also believe many adults would love an interactive ball that they can control and design their own interactions – its packed full of features! Hopefully it will also allow kids who’ve outgrown our app to experiment with our technology in a more challenging way, bringing longevity to the product.

We’ve approached the kids who’ll play with Hackaball as the future Makers. The idea of hacking and getting close to technology starts with how the ball first arrives in your home. Kids open the packaging to find the ball is broken: Hackaball has crash-landed on earth and needs to be put back together again. After their first achievement, making the ball, kids are challenged to play games, change existing ones, fix broken games and create new ones from scratch.

We specifically designed the ball and packaging to be gender neutral – making it feel accessible to both boys and girls from the very beginning. We also expanded on the ability of the ball to include both hard and soft skills – from the tactile and linear computational thinking, to the storytelling and imagination-driven game creation, teaching a new generation of Makers to combine technology and creativity. We think that the kids who play with Hackaball would move on to Arduino in their teens!

During the first opening of Casa Jasmina, Bruce Sterling found a moment to discuss about IoT, Casa Jasmina and Arduino future plans with Massimo Banzi. Check out this exclusive video were two of the minds behind the Casa Jasmina project dialogate about the future:

Let’s start exploring a bit more about Intel Edison. As you may already know, Intel provides 2 different hardware platforms to work with Edison development board: the core module is called Intel Edison Compute Module, while the 2 extension boards are called Intel Edison Arduino Board and Intel Edison Breakout Board respectively. We refer to them as the Arduino module and mini-breakout board, respectively. The tutorial of this week is called Getting Started with Intel Edison Mini Breakout Board:

It is probably more common to use the Arduino module, since it’s easy to use and has many useful features, most notably the pin headers. However, the mini-breakout’s main advantage comes from its size and possible use as a wearable.

In this tutorial, you’ll get more familiar the mini-breakout board, learn how to use it for basic tasks, and then build a small “blink” example based on this knowledge.

Last week Temboo just added new Conditions features to its IoT Mode interface, making it even easier to connect your Arduino to the Internet of Things! Now, the functionality of Temboo’s Device Coder has been extended to all 2000+ Choreos in the Temboo Library, meaning that data collected from sensors attached to an Arduino Yún can be used to trigger any cloud process, and responses from the cloud can be used to trigger all sorts of hardware actions on your board.

Using IoT Mode on the Temboo website, you can automatically generate ready-to-run Arduino code to execute Choreos from your board without having to write a single line of code yourself—just specify which board and shield you’re using and what Choreo you’d like to run, and all the necessary code will be generated immediately in your browser. And you can also now visually specify what sort of hardware inputs and outputs you would like to use: the code to connect them to your Choreo will be generated as well.

The visual interface includes a pin selector tool that lets you choose which pins you want to activate and how you want them to interact with the Choreo you are running. The pin selector identifies the pins on your board that are available, and also indicates whether those pins are configured to work with digital or analog I/O. Like the generated code itself, the pin selector interface will change to reflect the board and shield you’ve chosen to work with.

Conditions make it quick and easy to build a massive range of IoT applications, like a thermometer that sends SMS alerts, or a motor that runs when it receives an email. Just specify how you want your pins to interact with the web services you are using, and thanks to Conditions, what you specify will be reflected in a complete, production-ready program generated instantly in your browser. Try it out, and email hey@temboo.com to let them know what you think!

« Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness » is a sentence from Samuel Beckett but also the title of Eugenio Ampudia’s last artwork created and installed with the support of Ultra-lab and running on Arduino Mega and GSM Shield:

The exhibition room has in its center a rectangular mirror made of water that reflects the room and the visitors. The perfect still water, metaphor of silence, is broken by the irruption of sporadic waves. These movements, the stain on silence, are provoked by the visitors’ interactions. In the heart of the water tank, a dispositive is able to receive calls and to open a valve. To each visitor’s call, so a series of movements is generated and break the calm.

Ultra-lab realized the technical part of the artwork thanks to an Arduino Mega, the Arduino GSM shield and various valves open and close by the Arduino Mega when a call is received by the shield. The dispositive is particularly interesting for its adaptation in a water context and for connecting valves.

Thanks to it, the artwork succeed to express beautifully the paradox between a destructive attraction for words and communication to which it’s hard to resist in order to prefer a finally inaccessible contemplation.

Jochen Maria Weber is a Researcher and Designer at the intersection of Interaction- and Industrial Design. He shared with us Project Cuckoo, a project running on Arduino Yún and looking at our interactions with intercepted social networks and how alternative ways of communicating might change them:

Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and co. collect our data and are forced to have a backdoor for state surveillance. Therefore Cuckoo encrypts messages into randomly generated words, meanings and noise in order to scatter them over multiple communication networks simultaneously. Each letter of an original message gets translated into complex forms of certain length forming new sentences. Those sentences get posted to aforementioned social networks, next to randomly generated noise-sentences for distraction. The encryption method can be changed with every new message. Any receiving Cuckoo-unit following the respective social network accounts can filter and decrypt the important posts according to their encryption method and time stamp. Cuckoo combines social networks to build a hidden one on top of their infrastructure. An egg in the others’ nests.

Cuckoo uses an Arduino YUN to connect wirelessly as a stand-alone device to the internet. It also does the en- and decryption of all messenges and made it comfortable to connect to Twitter, Skype and Tumblr API with Temboo.

‘Social Vibes’ is a Masters Degree (MSc.) project, in Interactive Media by Cian McLysaght, at the University of Limerick, Ireland. They shared with us their project, running on Arduino Uno, composed by a physical artifact designed and created specifically for an installation adopting the fundamental sound mechanisms used in a vibraphone, know also as a ‘Vibe’:

The instrument consists of twelve musical tones of different pitches. The music created on the instrument is derived from a continuous stream of input via multiple users on Twitter and the explicit interaction from Twitter users, tweeting the instrument directly to the project’s, “@vibe_experiment” Twitter account. Data associated with the emotional status of Twitter users, is mined from the Twitter network via Twitter’s open source, application programming interface (API).

For example if a user tweets “The sun is out, I’m happy”, the code I’ve written will strip out key words and strings associated with the user’s emotional state, within the tweets, ie “I’m happy”, and translate this to a musical notation. Mining Twitter’s API, allows a continuous stream of data. These emotional states are then mapped to specific notes on the physical musical instrument, located in a public space. The tempo of the musical expression will be entirely based upon the speed and volume of the incoming tweets on the Twitter API.

Twitter users who are both followers and non followers of the musical instrument’s Twitter account (@vibe_experiment) can tweet directly to the instrument and this direct interaction will be given precedence, allowing user’s who tweet directly to have their emotional state ‘played’. This allows users to hijack or take over the instrument and experiment with it in a playful manner, but also allows those with musical knowledge the potential to compose simple musical arrangements. When users are not tweeting the instrument directly, then the instrument will revert to mining the Twitter API.

To entice users to interact and observe the action of the instrument there is a live streaming broadcast of the instrument via Twitcam on the Vibe’s Twitter account. This is a live streaming broadcast of the instrument via Twitcam on the @vibe_experiment account. Twitcam, is Twitter’s built in live-streaming platform. This simply requires a webcam and a valid Twitter account.

The instrument constantly tweets back updates to it’s own Twitter account to not only inform people of the general status but also to engage users to interact directly with the ‘Vibe’.